Research highlights ways to protect astronaut cardiovascular health from space radiation

Research over the last 20 years has shown that atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory condition of the arterial blood vessel wall. Soluble mediators such as cytokines and chemokines are pivotal players in this disease, promoting vascular inflammation. However, the development of anti-inflammatory therapeutics directed against such mediators that could prevent atherosclerosis has proven difficult, despite promising clinical studies in the recent past. Previous anti-inflammatory therapeutic strategies to prevent atherosclerosis, heart attacks, strokes, rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases have mainly been based ...

Remote sensing technology has become a vital tool for scientists over the past several decades for monitoring changes in land use, ice cover, and vegetation across the globe. Satellite imagery, however, is typically available at only coarse resolutions, allowing only for the analysis of broad trends over large areas. Remote-controlled drones are an increasingly affordable alternative for researchers working at finer scales in ecology and agriculture, but the laser-based technology used to estimate plant productivity and biomass, such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), remain prohibitively expensive. In research presented in a recently published issue of Applications in Plant Sciences, researchers ...

New research has shown that results of blood tests routinely performed by GPs everywhere contain a hidden fingerprint that can identify people silently developing potentially fatal liver cirrhosis. The researchers have developed an algorithm to detect this fingerprint that could be freely installed on any clinical computer, making this a low-cost way for GPs to carry out large scale screening using patient data they already hold. Liver cirrhosis is the second leading disease causing premature death in working-age people (after heart disease). It develops silently ...

Peer-reviewed / Observational study / People For the study, published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, researchers analysed data from the UK Biobank of 500,000 people aged 58 years on average, and found that people with higher than normal blood sugar levels were 42% more likely to experience cognitive decline over an average of four years, and were 54% more likely to develop vascular dementia over an average of eight years (although absolute rates of both cognitive decline and dementia were low). The associations remained true after other influential factors had been taken into account - including age, deprivation, smoking, BMI and whether or not participants had cardiovascular disease. People with ...

A team of scientists have measured the relative importance of the different obstacles that carbon dioxide (CO2) encounters in its voyage from the atmosphere to the interior of plant cells, where it is converted into sugars. This research leading method provides much needed information that will help to increase the yield of important food crops such as cowpea, soybean and cassava. "Our data highlights promising targets to improve the diffusion of CO2 through the leaf with the aim of boosting crop productivity," says lead author Dr Tory Clarke, who works at The Australian National University (ANU), as part of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic ...

Psychologists at the University of Bath, Cardiff, and London have developed the first ever 'mind-reading questionnaire' to assess how well people understand what others are really thinking. A new approach to 'mind-reading' has been developed by researchers at the University of Bath, Cardiff, and London to improve how well we understand what others are thinking. And it transpires that women are much better than men at putting themselves in someone else's shoes. Mind-reading, sometimes referred to in psychology as 'mentalising', is an important ability enabling us to pick-up on subtle behavioural cues that might indicate that someone we are speaking to is thinking ...

A new modelling study published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) shows that the UK's coronavirus vaccination program is already reducing daily deaths. However, reductions of hospital and intensive care (ICU) admissions will likely take several weeks longer, with large reductions seen by the end of March and continuing into April. The study is by Professor Tim Cook (Consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, Bath, UK, and Honorary Professor, School of Medicine, University of Bristol, UK) and Mr ...

Anti-retroviral drugs are a vital tool in the prevention and treatment of HIV. A new study of pregnant women in Tanzania shows that life-long antiviral treatment also seems to prevent viral transmission from mother to baby. The results of the study, which was conducted in part by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in Lancet HIV, make a promising contribution to the WHO's work with HIV prevention in low and middle-income countries. Just over eight years ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued recommendations known as Option B+ for a simpler and more effective prevention and treatment for HIV during and beyond pregnancy in low and middle-income countries. One arm of the Option B+ programme involved ensuring that pregnant women with HIV ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University used a three-model approach to trace the between-farm spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), as well as to analyze the efficacy of different control strategies in these scenarios. The approach may enable farmers to be more proactive in preventing the spread of PEDV and to optimize their efforts to control the disease. PEDV is a virus that causes high mortality rates in preweaned piglets. The virus emerged in the U.S. in 2013 and by 2014 had infected approximately 50 percent of breeding herds. PEDV is transmitted by contact with contaminated fecal matter. "We wanted to compare three different models by using actual outbreak data in order to test their efficacy," says Gustavo Machado, assistant professor of population ...

To build a universal quantum computer from fragile quantum components, effective implementation of quantum error correction (QEC) is an essential requirement and a central challenge. QEC is used in quantum computing, which has the potential to solve scientific problems beyond the scope of supercomputers, to protect quantum information from errors due to various noise. Published by the journal Nature, research co-authored by University of Massachusetts Amherst physicist Chen Wang, graduate students Jeffrey Gertler and Shruti Shirol, and postdoctoral researcher Juliang Li takes a step toward building a fault-tolerant ...